A Bed of Earth: The Secret Books of Venus

In this “deliciously creepy” novel by the Bram Stoker Award winner, two feuding families face supernatural vengeance in a parallel 16th-century Venice (Publishers Weekly).   In the City of Venus, two noble families—the della Scorpias and the Barbarons—have been locked in a bitter dispute over burial grounds on the overcrowded Isle of the Dead. But it is fourteen-year-old Meralda della Scorpia who pays the ultimate price for their rivalry.   As years pass, parties complicit in her disappearance begin to suffer the consequences. Their shocking deaths can only mean one thing: A supernatural force has been unearthed from the city’s rotting understructure. As these bizarre events throw the city into a panic, a humble apprentice gravedigger is left to sort out the mysteries and subdue the ancient terror that threatens to destroy the entire republic.

From Publishers Weekly

This deliciously creepy third installment in Lee's Secret Books of Venus series (following Faces Under Water and Saint Fire) deals with death and the question of whether humans have souls. Written from the perspective of Bartolome da Loura di An'Santa, a Settera Master of the Guild of Gravemakers, the story centers on a longstanding feud regarding disputed burial grounds of two powerful families. Like the Italian city-state of Venice on which it's patterned, Venus includes islands, canals, lagoons and little land for Christian burial. Any plot of ground set aside for graves is highly sought after, so when two of the most powerful families in Venus squabble over a patch of earth, the outcome is a vendetta that goes on for generations. At some point, far away from the origins of the feud, a girl from the della Scorpia family, who is betrothed to an evil old shell of a man, takes a fancy to a no-name painter's assistant, loses her virginity and tries to run off with her lover. Unfortunately, when word reaches a member of the other side of the vendetta, the girl and her lover meet a gruesome end. From this awful event comes the winding tale that entangles humans, spirits, death, life and the earth itself. The City of Venus casts a gloomy, ghostly shadow over the plot, and several wickedly ingenious deaths (including death by flamingo) serve to underline Lee's well-earned reputation as a master of dark fantasy. FYI: The author has won many World Fantasy Awards as well as the August Derleth Award.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

An intense rivalry between the noble houses of Barbarons and della Scorpia over a prime piece of burial ground escalates into treachery as a daughter of the della Scorpia family falls prey to a vicious plot. Mysterious events dog both houses until a self-effacing gravedigger manages to uncover the dark secret behind the feud and discovers some remarkable truths about his own past. Lee's mystical alternate history of a 16th-century city much like Venice continues with a powerfully told tale of youthful passion and ghostly revenge. Libraries owning the previous two books in the series (Faces Under Water; Saint Fire) should add this elegantly written sequel to their fantasy collection. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Lee's latest alchemical Secret Book of Venus is an eerie, haunting romance--a story told by a "gravemaker" of lives gone awry, the supernatural son of one feuding family and the natural daughter of the other. The feuding parties are two great families of Venus, the della Scorpias and the Barbarons, contending over a parcel of land on the isle of the dead. The tangled threads out of which the tale is spun are drawn out from Meralda della Scorpia's tortured, terrible death and by the son she bore in Venus' lagoons, who swears vengeance on her killers. Bartolome the gravemaker learns the almost unbelievable truth of his role in these events, and the connections between his story, Meralda's, and Beatrixa Barbaron's, from his mistress, Flavia. Death is, after all, not always the final word, he learns, and the bed of earth, in particular, doesn't necessarily stop anyone's story. In Lee's alternate Venice, the sixteenth century is beautifully transmogrified into a world in which spirits walk the streets and heaven can be visited. Regina SchroederCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Tanith Lee is one of the leading fantasy authors working today. She has written over 50 novels and short story collections, among them the bestselling Flat Earth Series. She has won the World Fantasy Award numerous times as well as the August Derleth Award.

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